Paul Dano Takes the GameStop Short Squeeze a Long Way in ‘Dumb Money’ Trailer

Two years ago, the bizarre story dominating the news cycle wasn’t about a group of billionaires lost at sea, but a different group of billionaires panicking as amateur investors on Reddit and YouTube inflated a doomed GameStop stock to get rich quick. In the first trailer for Dumb Money, the upcoming film based on Ben Mezrich’s book The Antisocial Network, financial analyst Keith Gil (portrayed by Paul Dano) takes that GameStop short squeeze a very long way.

When Gil’s wife, portrayed by Shailene Woodley, asks how much he made in a day, he sheepishly responds with a life-changing dollar amount neither of them can fully comprehend: $5 million. But when multi-millionaire hedge fund manager Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen) is asked a similar question by his own wife — “how much did we lose today?” — he answers with a devastating amount: a billion.

During the entire saga, the stock-buying app Robinhood functioned as the playing ground that essentially transferred all of this money from the pockets of the rich into the hands of the poor. And while these new investors learned how to play a game they had been intentionally kept out of with convoluted rules, the Wall Street veterans on the inside scrambled to hit reset and regain control before they lost it all to some losers on the internet.

Dumb Money, which hits theaters Sept. 22, features appearances from Pete Davidson, America Ferrera, Nick Offerman, Anthony Ramos, Vincent D’Onofrio (playing hedge fund manager and New York Mets owner Steve Cohen), and Sebastian Stan. It was directed by Craig Gillespie with a based-on-a-true-story screenplay written by Lauren Schuker and Rebecca Angelo.